Christmas came and went and all gadget freaks are no doubt thinking about what to give themselves seeing as they didn't get the gadget they wanted.

So I'm in the market for a new PMP. I was seriously thinking about a shiny new 160Gb Classic iPod. But news that Rockbox doesn't work, Sync utilities have been borked by Apple and the fairly high price is putting me off.

So how about "Not an iPod" as an alternative?

- Must be >100Gb, preferably 160.
- Plain old USB mass storage, drag and drop Sync.
- Zero interest in DRM music so all I want is the ability to play MP3.

Or do I just slap another bigger disk in my ageing Zen Xtra for peanuts? So that's what I did. I got a 160Gb disk for my Zen Xtra and tried installing it.

- I had to uninstall WMP11 to reload the firmware
- Formatting the disk, it only recognised 128Gb
- Transferring tracks worked for a bit but it started throwing errors
- Stupidly persistent I re-formatted, re-initialised, re-booted several times.
- I eventually got 65Gb of music loaded before it refused to accept any more. This is less than than the 70Gb the old 80Gb disk held.
- I gave up

What's wrong here
- Creative got screwed over by Microsoft when they bet on MS PFS-MTP
- Creative got screwed by their firmware supplier (presumably outsourced) when they built in hard and soft limits on capacity
- Customers got screwed by Creative because these problems are well known but they still haven't bothered to update the firmware on old hardware
- Creative and Customers got screwed over again when MS gave up on PFS and went into competition with them with Zune
- It's time for disk drive manufacturers to stop lying. 1GB does not equal 1,000,000,000 bytes.

So 2-3 years after first hitting the requirement there still isn't anyone who makes a personal music player that I want to buy. I'm almost at the point of just going "Screw you guys, I'm going home" and buying an iPod Classic 160Gb knowing that it's only a temporary fix and it will just annoy me.

How did we get to the point where it's acceptable that a product costing £200 upwards is a disposable item? To which I'd add, "If you can't open it, break it and fix it again, you don't own it".



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[ 03-Feb-08 5:23pm ] [ , ]